Life chronicles in academia
The rabidness of the slang ‘wahala no dey finish’ has kept a lot of me running amok. I looked into Guinevere's raccoon eyes and cringed in my legs. The gout of blood oozing intermittently was eerie. I accompanied her to the abattoir. In England, the racial abuse was intense. Mingling with Caribbean students were always crooked up because either they were full of bad vibes to rapport or they sulked in hushed tones. ‘You got the message’, my inner mind would repeat, as I look hopefully.
The ensuing pace is what I thought was necessary. My black skin with blots of tiny birth marks accentuated my handsomeness. It does not go without saying that may yellowish, auburn-tipped, sable hair was awesome. That pacificness to move into my room and hop on my bed totally forgetting all that had just happened. Were it not for my I-pad—I carried all about the dormitory—I would have been unaware. I knew they hated blacks; I just knew. African hostels with students packed like sardines was a deplorable sight. After all, the pact was effectual balloting, yet we never got any good hostel! So gruesome was it for us!
The oafish sophomores trolling boxes upon boxes like robots. Their unapologetic large eyes with pretentious sympathy, ascending the stairs into the air-conditioned cottage-like room. The dormitory had a draughty cellar where students could mellow out during pastime, cavorting with jolly friends. I was enticed to join them one night, but I dreaded to go, really.
English ladies with obdurate ideologies, heating discussions with thick-rimmed glasses looking like grayed out kaleidoscopes. It remembered me of Babcock's Sunday meetings where I saw ladies from different oeuvres. Ladies were sacrilegiously uncladed to the sights of men with amorous infatuations, totally against the sacrosant laws of the institution, Babcock. I took it upon myself to be saddled with the constant responsibility of abnegating friendliness and revelling contention in aloofness. One careless night I accompanied my friend, Francis Michael to an abattoir to binge on suya well-barbequed. The quadrant of my abdomen ached with indigestion. I grunted in wry yawns and false grins while eating the barbequed suya of Edinburgh. All day long I had been calm with no pain whatsoever, why now! I hated myself, to say the least.
I had terrible fever the next morning, I groped around to prepare noodles and took a bottle of orange juice from my table refrigerator. I quaffed the juice slowly and heaved a sigh ‘Haa! ’. I was a habitué of the toilet, I think, after every meal I had. One of these days, I hacked my forehead on the wall. I applied shear butter and drank water. My leg rose like the hackles of a dog’s hairy back. I dislocated a bone. Haemolysis happened from the fissure of the cut; blood dropped onto the floor, just too much. I looked haggard. An idea sprung to my mind to rub ‘Ọrkponkú—a black ointment I collected from my mother in Nigeria’. My leg lost identicalness. It swole painfully and I was forced to use a grip bandage. The idyll room bliss disappeared, if there ever was. If memory saves me, I slept long enough till I woke up with a headache and slight jaundice. I felt ignoble going out to buy groceries. God bless, Stephen, who came over with cooked food until I was able to fend for myself. Stephen’s room was across from mine. He idosyncratically spoke well; he was not the jabbering type that would leave before one can say Jack Robinson; he was a sweet soul; courteous, panache of guy. He would bring a jacket to me in cold days and keep me company while also taking lectures online. The jagged edges of my door tore his jaded cardigan he was wont to wearing on cold days, very slightly. He elucidated deraphic courses like Jacquerie Oblivion to me; he was a smart dude.
Studying law at university was a blast from the past because I had to tab textbooks and sengue to other text materials until I got to certain topics I would average out all that I have read.
The tact to interact with students was a bridge too far. Regardless, my gouche lifestyle apparently took its toll, because I was taciturn in gatherings at the end of the month—about online classes and complaints. The ubiquitousness of gales of resentment from foreign students was underwhelming. Thankfully, the pandemic cum epidemic was abating and school would return to its regular schedule of in-person classes, afortiori.
Being a recipient of a scholarship and an erstwhile expatriate of Uganda, taught me a lot as a human being. I had the ulterior motive to be renowned in the world and here I am a Lawyer and Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN).
I vacillated between entrusting into the grooves of academia or establishing a chamber which will be a central place where I will mentor junior Lawyers in the practice of Law. I am in-between.
I had always envisioned to be a change to the vacuum created by injustice. The vagrant desire to be a change where people are accustomed to this anomaly as ideal. That vagueness that builds up from a dire passion; I could but carry all before myself. My valiance I have come to adore is unparalleled; my waging a war seemed to sink into atrophy because people never gave their legitimacy to my laconic clause of upheaval.
The first summer I arrived in the United Kingdom was fantastic. I wallowed in cold-breezy chills. My wan Nigerian looks totally disappeared and I became a dynamo with fun. I sat on the feet of my watchfulness for I was naïve but as I stayed on, I got used to my routines.